Hillary Clinton: Renaissance Woman
Hillary Clinton
Although Hillary Clinton officially announced her candidacy in April 2015, the whispers that she would be running in 2016 began almost the moment that Barack Obama won the 2008 nomination.
Any statements that Clinton or anyone close to her made suggesting that she wouldn't were – rightly, it now seems – assumed to be simply part of the long term plan: Be an excellent Secretary of State; be supportive of the President; but, crucially, maintain a distinct voice and profile within the confines of holding office in someone else's administration. There's little doubt that she succeeded in this mission, as she has tended to be successful in most (clearly not all) of her political career. Indeed, for the world at large, the assumption is that her candidacy will lead to the second great 'first' in a row for the office of the President of the United States of America.
But alongside the symbolic nature of the prospect of a woman becoming the most powerful person in the world, she has substantial achievements and experiences: Eight years as the most active First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, for one. Moreover, she has countless achievements that are hers alone: She has been a lawyer, campaigner, New York Senator, Secretary of State and was the runner-up in the 2008 race for presidential nominee from the Democrat Party. If she does become President, it won't be because she happened to marry and stick with old William: it will be her achievement alone.
Hillary’s father has been described as a ‘rock-ribbed, middle-class Republican small businessman’. The description lends itself well to her official biography being littered with 'across the aisle' appeals to her rivals. Interestingly, her official biography makes no mention of her education beyond the fact that she attended public schools. One might think that straight 'A's were a good qualification for the office of US President but here we run into one of the curiosities of American culture and the West's attitude towards women:
You can be smart, but not too smart
. You can be country-smart, not city-smart; thoughtful, but not opinionated. Perhaps the symbol of a female president will overturn some of that prejudice.
Rodham was no slouch as a kid, but her decision to attend law school is given no attention by this official biography, although the fact that it was unusual for a young woman at the time is. Other sources expand somewhat on the decision, crediting her parents who, clearly willing to look beyond their conservative values, saw that her intelligence merited a serious, independent profession, whatever her gender. The glass ceiling, referenced by Clinton in her concession speech in 2007, was already beginning to show some cracks.
Her political career began in earnest while at Wellesley College. Another interesting point missing from the official biography is that the young Hillary was politically active from a young age. In fact, her earliest political activities were for the Republicans, a party which she did not completely abandon until her college days, when the increasing division in American eventually saw her joining the Democrats permanently.
Before this, she was president of the Wellesley Young Republicans. She stepped down from this role as the American Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War began to have a serious effect on American society, including Clinton, who no longer felt the Republicans represented the America she wanted to be a part of, though she had not yet moved all the way to the Democratic worldview (after all, during this time, Southern Democrats were still virulently racist).
Her official online biography attributes this stance of racial equality to Rodham's attendance at Dr Martin Luther King’s speech in Chicago. While an official biography necessarily paints with a broad brush, a more considered approach might be to attribute Rodham's pro-Civil Rights beliefs to her father's matter-of-fact conservatism, the fundamental idea of which was that everyone, regardless of gender, race or what-have-you, deserves the chance to get on in life. These old-school conservative beliefs, frequently neglected by today’s foghorn voices of the American right, are very much embodied in Rodham's ideas and career. In any case, by the time she left Wellesley, she had also left the Republican Party for good. She had also already started to come to national attention
.
Rodham was featured in an article published in
Life
magazine after giving an impressive speech criticizing Senator Brooke, who had spoken before her at the Wellesley commencement address.
Rodham's relationship with her future husband – and future president – Bill Clinton, whom she met at Yale Law School, seems to have cemented her Democratic leanings, with the two campaigning together for Democratic politicians. Both made concessions to the other over career and education, with Bill cancelling his plans to join Hillary one summer, suggesting an unusual (for the time) equality in their relationship. Indeed, she turned down his first suggestion of marriage as she wanted to maintain her independence from him, and used the name 'Hillary Rodham' until the early 1980s, when she began to be usually known as Hillary Clinton due to conservative voters looking askance at a married woman using her maiden name. This was an early clash with the public and the media that would foreshadow much of what was to come.
Rodham interned at a firm specialising in civil liberties and constitutional rights, a factoid that her official bio ignores in favour of touting her work with 'children and families' – another irritating compromise to appeal to conservatives, given that one might think a working knowledge of the constitution was rather more important for a president and rather more important to conservative voters.
Both Hillary and Bill graduated from Yale in 1973, Rodham having taken a course of post-graduate study partly to be with her future husband, who was one year behind her at Yale. During this time, she published the first of many scholarly articles, which were well-received and frequently cited in the academic and legal community.
Scholar, Lawyer, Politician, Investor
Having worked as a Congressional counsel but failed to pass the bar in Washington DC, Rodham moved to Arkansas with Bill Clinton so that he could pursue his legal and political career there. Of course, she had no intention of becoming a housewife: She taught Law at the University of Arkansas and helped found a legal aid clinic there while Bill pursued a congressional race (which he lost) before his successful attempt to be elected Attorney General of Arkansas.
During this time, while Bill Clinton pursued his political career, Rodham maintained her professional and intellectual independence. She practised law with the Rose Law firm, adding experience with intellectual property law to her existing knowledge of civil rights and, of course, the law pertaining to children and families. She also authored, as she had previously, important scholarly articles in this latter area, bringing coherence and intellectual rigour to a set of ideas regarding the rights of children under American law. These articles and the ideas they set out and clarified have been praised by the American Bar Association and, like her articles written while still at Yale, were frequently cited by others. At this stage, Rodham seems to have been content to effect change in the background, while her husband had the high-profile political career. However, her continuing engagement with the ideas that drove her demonstrated an ability to exercise considerable influence over her areas of expertise, and would foreshadow her later roles as First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State.
Increasingly, though, her profile would rise, both independently and in tandem with that of her husband, as she founded advocacy organizations, campaigned for Democratic politicians, made successful investments (some argued these were suspiciously successful) and eventually came to the notice of then-President Jimmy Carter, who appointed her to the board of the Legal Services Corporation.
Those who suggest that Hillary Clinton's current high profile is due partly or wholly to her husband's would do well to remember her list of achievements, all made before Bill Clinton came to any kind of political prominence. Clearly, then, Rodham's subsequent successful political career has less to do with her husband than a casual observer might assume. Although his successful bid to become Governor of Arkansas led to her appointment to various state-level committees as First Lady of Arkansas and undoubtedly deepened her political expertise, her independent successes as a scholar, lawyer, campaigner and investor more than qualified her for her subsequent positions, whoever her husband might have been.
The 1970 and '80s weren't all good for Rodham: It was during this time she became involved in a disastrous investment in the Whitewater Development Corporation, something that would haunt both her and Bill Clinton during his presidency as legal proceedings over accusations of fraud dragged on interminably. Although both were cleared of any wrongdoing, the legal case ran for years and several of their associates, including Bill's successor as Governor, were prosecuted.
Thus began an awkward pattern for both Bill and Hillary, where they seemed permanently very close to wrongdoing but rarely – the exception involving the world's most famous blue dress – actually involved in it. Suspicion of other financial investments made by Hillary would follow, along with a succession of examples of what could be generously termed absent-mindedness with regard to what Rodham had done with various files, how she had got them in the first place and whether or not she ever fired anyone she shouldn't have. This latter led to the amusingly cautious finding that she had made 'factually inaccurate statements' but she hadn't known they were inaccurate at the time.
Those with good memories may recall her husband's similarly careful declaration regarding the meaning of the word 'is'. This kind of clearly avoidable slip-up would also bedevil her first presidential run and cause some smaller problems following her time as Secretary of State. Her supporters can only hope she has learned from her mistakes in this area.
By the time her husband had been elected as Governor of Arkansas for the first time, Hillary was already well-embarked on her own political career, working as Indiana campaign director during Carter's bid for the presidency and, as already mentioned, serving as a director and subsequently chair of the Legal Services Corporation, the first woman to hold this position.
When Bill became Governor, he made his wife chair of the Rural Health Advisory Committee, where she again demonstrated her dedication to helping the poorest and most vulnerable in American society by successfully fighting for federal funding for an expansion of medical facilities for the poor. She also worked on the Arkansas Education Standards Committee during Bill's second, non-consecutive term as Governor, and was a leading influence in turning Arkansas' education system around, taking it from the worst in the country to among the best with a hard-headed set of reforms, including better pay for teachers and more opportunities for gifted children alongside increased investment in vocational education. Such successful policies led to Bill's subsequent re-elections as Governor throughout the 1980s. It was becoming increasingly clear to onlookers that Hillary (now using the Clinton name in a bid to reassure conservative voters) was no ordinary First Lady. Her active role during her husband's Governorship foreshadowed the role she would take as First Lady of the United States, as an adviser to her husband and advocate for her own missions and ideas.